My 5 Favourite Design Resources

Alex Trowell • 18 January 2022

Before I started designing I virtually knew nothing about resources that were available online and I primarily stuck to what was available within the Adobe programs.

However as I became more experienced I discovered different websites that have really helped develop and improve my work. There are a lot of design resource websites out there that offer free and premium photography, icons, vectors and fonts.

The more websites and resources I have found while designing the more my work has improved and it’s been easier to overcome creative blocks. In this blog post I’d like to share some websites that have really helped improve my work and hopefully they can mprove yours too. I will share sites that have a high quality collection of Mockups, Fonts, Photography & Illustrations.

Unblast - www.unblast.com

Unblast is one the websites I use the most as it’s collection of really high quality mockups help showcase my work on different products or touchpoints. The quality of the final mockups in a project is crucial as they can really improve your presentations and proposals and make them more likely to be approved.

Another feature of Unblast is that it holds a free collection of modern and unique typefaces and icons. It’s really useful to have all these free resources in the same location and with large thumbnails you can quickly browse through and find what’s right for your project. There is also a page with free to use illustrations and colour palettes which I haven’t used too much as I prefer other websites. (Vecteezy & Coolors).

Vecteezy - www.vecteezy.com

As a Graphic Designer who primarily studied minimal design, Illustration has never been one of my strong points and if you don’t have the budget to commission an Illustrator you can struggle to create what the client may want. Vecteezy has a great collection of free to use and premium vector illustrations in all different styles.

With the Illustrations being in vector format you can easily open them up in Illustrator and tweak the colours or shapes to work cohesively with your existing design. This is by far my most used and favourite website for vector illustrations and it quite often helps me overcome creative blocks with its wide range of templates.

Unsplash - www.unsplash.com

My third favourite design resource is Unsplash which has a collection of 1000's of high quality free to use photographs. I’m not usually a fan of using stock photography as I mostly think of the really standard staged stock photograph which is used in a lot of popular memes.

However Unsplash has a collection of images that are really unique and interesting. I use this website a lot for projects that don’t have the budget to have original photography and it never diminishes the quality of the final designs because Unsplash’s collection is so vast that you can always find suitable images for your project.

I used to use Pexels for all my stock photography but after trying Unsplash I much prefer the categories and catalogue of images you can choose from. Pexels can still be useful in the rare times that Unsplash doesn’t have an image that fits within my project.

Displaay Type Foundry - www.displaay.net

Starting as a designer I only used websites like DaFont and 1001 Fonts because I never knew of any other options for free typography. After using these sites for a while a lot of the fonts I downloaded were missing characters or became faulty so I switched to using Google and Adobe Fonts.These sites have a large collection of web friendly fonts that can work for professional projects.

Google & Adobe can become predictable after a while so if you want your designs to stand out it’s best to source independent type foundries and invest in some premium fonts. I’ve tried a few type foundries for projects but my overall favourite is definitely Displaay which has a large collection of premium and some free fonts. The other positive is that all the fonts have a free trial option so you can test if the typography is right for your project.

Supply Family - www.supply.family

My final favourite design resource website is Supply Family which I’ve only started using recently for bigger projects but I think they provide the best premium mockups. Although some packages are quite expensive you can purchase individual mockups for a more reasonable fee.

This website has some of the best mockups available for showcasing your work and the collections allow you to display different designs within mockups that stay within the same theme. This can really make your final presentation or proposal look really professional. Another great use for this site is the different premium textures available, you can also get high quality textures from Unsplash and Pexels but Supply Family textures in my opinion just look and work alot better and can add a lot of depth to your designs.

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